My research
Currently, 97% of potential new anti-cancer drugs fail when they are tested in humans. This is due to the way that researchers study cancer in the laboratory, either using cells grown in plastic flasks or animal models, which struggle to mimic a human tumour in the body. Encapsulating cancer cells into spherical 'bubbles' of a biomaterial is a promising way of producing more 'human-like' laboratory cancer models.
My research aims to create a tumour-like ‘bubble’ to encapsulate breast cancer cells inside, and do this in a scalable way to mimic key tumour characteristics and therefore improve the success rate of breast cancer drug testing.
Many cancer researchers are now interested in 3D models of cancer, to study a more ‘human-like’ cancer environment in the lab. However, to create these models, many researchers use techniques which are labour intensive and not easily adaptable to be used on a large scale. My work uses a technique that is entirely scalable and therefore the resulting cancer models that I make could be useful to drug companies when they test thousands of potential drug compounds.